Saturday, March 3, 2018

I love Scott Alario’s work. I always thought of myself as someone
who would eventually be a father and my only reluctance was that I enjoyed my
life and didn’t want to give it up for parenthood. Alario’s work holds out hope
that parenting could be as rewarding as people say, but still allow for a
fruitful artistic life. He has struck a delicate balance between a believable
and romantic portrayal of parenting. He has taken the imaginary world of his
children and manifested them photographically into something real. Having
followed the work, I always assumed that Alario had one child, a girl, and was
surprised to read in the press release that the current photographs were of his
son. The amount of purple and pink and the lovely portrait of his child as Rey
from Star Wars speaks to an open minded gender-neutral parenting. In his last
two shows, Alario’s vantage point has shifted towards focusing more on the
color and surface of the things that surround his children, with telling details
like brightly colored patched pants, scribbled-on toys, and the touching of
paintings that all speaks a progressive if not artsy parenting, a childhood
that is more than familiar to me as the son of hippies.

The show also takes a step forward in marrying artistic
practice and family with three detailed hallucinatory collaged landscapes that
seem to be sourced from faded comic books by Alario and his wife Marguerite
Keyes.